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Statement by U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the Higgs Particle

July 4, 2012 - 8:02am

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“I congratulate the thousands of scientists around the globe for their outstanding work in searching for the Higgs boson," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. "Today’s announcement on the latest results of this search shows the benefits of sustained investments in basic science by governments around the world. Scientists have been looking for the Higgs particle for more than two decades; these results help validate the Standard Model used by scientists to explain the nature of matter.”

Background Information on the U.S. Support for the Large Hadron Collider

Hundreds of scientists and graduate students from American institutions have played important roles in the search for the Higgs using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory. More than 1,700 scientists, engineers, technicians and graduate students from U.S. institutions – including 89 American universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories – helped design, build and operate the LHC accelerator and its four particle detectors. The United States provides support for research and detector operations at the LHC and also supplies computing for the ATLAS and CMS experiments through DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

The vast majority of U.S. scientists participate in the LHC experiments from their home institutions, remotely accessing and analyzing the data through high-capacity networks and grid computing.